2021 Editorial Editorial
Last year’s edition was exceptional because it took place, at Lussas, and we were able to physically meet and view together a set of films projected in a cinema or under the stars.
Our numbers were too small, of course, but this had unexpected or quite simply forgotten effects. Time seemed to slow down, a brutal but in part salutary deceleration. Speaking out after the films became easier, the words more attentive and welcoming, but no less critical. There was no need to queue under the sun in front of a cinema or to find a seat to have a drink or a meal… We seemed to recover the conviviality of the festival’s first years – of course tarnished by the weight of the pandemic and its effects on our lives – but yet more necessary after the long months spent in reclusion: we rediscovered the experience of a shared period of time.
Nonetheless, audiences were small and we were sometimes sorry for the films projected, even though the majority of them were given a precious window on Tënk. This year we plan to be more numerous even if we are still constrained by the restrictions that apply to large public events such as the festival at Lussas. The desire to maintain this shared time and space and also to bring to fruition the work accumulated over long months with our numerous collaborators has won out.
We returned to work on certain programmes that had been suspended and more particularly the seminars. The first was conceived on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the École documentaire, which we are extending, particularly during the week with films by former students and residents, and which will be celebrated with images and a ball, we hope. The seminar “Skipping school?” will question the transmission of cinema and confront with this question all those who want to film or ”camérer”. Such questions of words and language that translate states of mind and gestures will also be debated in the seminar “Writing – Dialogues”, which will set the stage for three dialogues on the gestures of cinematographic and literary writing around two films and a book. In both cases, we invite you to rediscover the kind of engagement required by these reflections that we enjoy carrying out with you.
We will be able to resume meetings with the different documentary organisations, APPA, La Boucle, as well as the “August encounters” and different moments that throw light on the work of producers but also the writing tasks assumed by filmmakers.
The programmes on offer by LaScam and the jury members of the “Brouillon d’un rêve ” seed fund will resume, as will the day organised by the Sacem, devoted this year to the composer Béatrice Thiriet and the writing of music for films. Our “Viewing experiences” programme will highlight a choice of contemporary documentaries from francophone European countries, chosen since its beginnings by peers with the idea of encouraging a dialogue between makers of films. Some of these films will also be present on Tënk, which celebrates its fifth year of existence. Several occasions will be organised to demonstrate its durability as a space of documentary transmission and, more recently, its support of production.
Farther afield across the world and cinema, we will examine one of the most free and vibrantly creative experiments in self-managed production, that of the Hungarian Béla Balázs studio. We will go on to discover the photochemical and visual experiments constituting a cinematic translation of a sensory perception of Australian nature and landscape with Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, then move on to Annik Leroy’s poetic wanderings, a music composed with languages and landscapes. “Doc Route: Austria” reveals the country’s cinema to reflect “a transit land, situatedness as a kind of temporary in-between state”, and proposes an approach that resembles that of the “Docmonde” programme, whose films explore and question ways of belonging to a family, a group, a country. They indicate something common to documentary films, an element of liberty which could be an attempt at transmission and inscription, a way of inhabiting the world and approaching as closely as possible the troubling aspects of the living.
Pascale Paulat et Christophe Postic